As a core technology of a next generation transport network, an Optical Transport Network (OTN), which is able to manage and schedule a large volume of services, has become a mainstream technology of a backbone network. The OTN is urged by the rapid growth of the demanded quantity of the data services and the continuous development of packet networks to better support various client service signals constantly and map these signals of different rates to corresponding OTN containers.
Existing standard OTN containers include Optical Channel Data Units (ODU) including ODU0, ODU1, ODU2, ODU3, ODU4 and so on, and ODUflex and the like have been further extended by the new G709 V3, wherein the ODUflex is able to carry a Constant Bit Rate (CBR) service and a packet service at any rate. When a packet service is carried, the packet service is generally packaged in the ODUflex by a Generic Framing Procedure (GFP), and the ODUflex further configures a capacity of the container according to a size of the service.
The ODUflex technology in the related art at least has the following disadvantages: the frame format of the ODUflex is a standard frame format defined by G709 V3, which has increase the complexity in implementing OTN-related standards, and requires a solution of developing a corresponding new OTN transmultiplexer, i.e. a brand new framing chip, so to map and demap an OTUflex frame. However, a current relatively mature frame chip fails to satisfy a requirement of OTUflex. Besides, a solution for adjusting an OTUflex bandwidth in the related art needs to use complicated protocols and transmit a large amount of overhead information on each node of a service path during bandwidth adjustment, and the protocols increases the complexity and a large amount of messages increase the risk of errors.
As a matter of fact, any data-oriented packet may be packaged in a GFP frame and mapped to an ODU container while this ODU container is not necessarily OTUflex. The standard OTN containers defined previously, including ODU0, ODU1, ODU2, ODU3, ODU4 and so on can absolutely satisfy the requirement of flexible configuration according to a size of a service.